I'll admit I held off on Piranesi because I was mixed on Johnathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, which was imaginative, but long and alienating. This was a mistake. Piranesi is an absolute joy.

Our narrator lives in a Great House, an infinite labyrinth of cyclopean rooms and corridors, massive marble statues, lower chambers flooded with tides, airy upper chambers full of clouds and mist. The House provides for him with fish and seaweed and fresh water, and he records its events and wonders dutifully in his journal. Our narrator knows that Piranesi is not his name, but it's what the only other living person in the world calls him, a well-dressed man the narrator calls the Other, who is searching for some lost and ancient wisdom.


Carceri d'invenzione XV, from Imaginary Prisons by the real antiquarian Giovanni Battista Piranesi

The journal entries seem precious at first, with their Random Capital Letters, but their earnest belief in the absolute reality of this liminal world drew me in within a few chapters. The mystery of the House, the narrator's past, and the agenda of the Other unfold in a revelation of transgressive philosophy, cultist criminal academics, and the disappearance of magic.

This book is a gem!

This collection is a lot like if Philip K. Dick had Twitter.

That's unfair, qntm is deeply their own voice, not a pastiche of any New Wave speed freak. But the paranoid vibe of mind uploading, simulated universes, the catastrophic collapse of humanity, that's draws comparisons to Dick, Alistair Reynolds, Ted Chiang. These stories are microscopic bites of weirdness that blow up into strange feasts.

Every Spy a Prince is an authorized biography version of Israel's secretive intelligence services, blending a public overview of the structure of this shadow world with a greatest hits version of its intelligence coups, and also some journalist criticism of the intelligence community.

The intelligence community in Israel has been traditionally protected by a veil of censorship unheard of in a democracy. The four key agencies at the time were Mossad, the foreign intelligence service; Aman, the military intelligence service; Shin Bet, in charge of domestic counter-intelligence and counter-terrorism; and Lekem, a scientific intelligence agency that also managed the nuclear program. Lekem has since been dissolved and its duties parceled out across the ministries. The identities of the heads of these agencies were not allowed to be published, as just the tip of secrecy.

The early Mossad was strongly influenced by the extremist militant group Irgun. The first few decades of intelligence work saw a series of massive human intelligence wins. Israeli intelligence got the first non-Soviet copy of Kruschev's denunciation of Stalin, convinced an Iraqi pilot to defect with a then state-of-the art MiG-21, and captured Eichmann in Argentina. Day to day, the intelligence community did pretty well. Spying is a difficult game, and while agents were blown due to bad luck or sloppy tradecraft, with fatal consequences for those in Arab countries, on the whole the Israeli secret services punched above their weight.

Conversely, the 70s and 80s saw a series of alarming failures. Aman missed preparations for the Yom Kippur War, confidently assuming the Arab states would never attack. Mossad fumbled the Lillehammer assassination, killing an innocent man in Norway instead of a member of Black September. After years of ruling the occupied Palestinians through informers, Shin Bet was caught off-guard by the first intifada. And Lekem ran Jonathan Pollard, an American Jew who's spying threatened the key relationship with the United States.

Raviv and Melman close by arguing that the harsh censorship reign is absurd given that the chief of Shin Bet can throw a wild birthday bash attended by gossip columnists. The also raise warnings about the existence of a shadow foreign policy run by ex-intelligence arms merchants. While Mossad has long served as a shadow foreign ministry in countries which cannot officially acknowledge Israel, ex-Mossad agents are only vaguely controlled by the state, and their misdeeds in training and supplying dictators and gangsters reflects badly on Israelis everywhere.

Every Spy A Prince is a little scattershot, and being published in 1990, it now a historical artifact itself. Rise and Kill First by Bergman is the 21st century update. The spycraft stories are still engaging, and its a good read.

The War of Atonement is an uneven account of the Yom Kippur War. Herzog was a retired IDF general and Israeli politician. Around the time the book was first published in 1975 he was Israeli ambassador to the UN, and he would later serve as the (largely ceremonial) President of Israel. This book is at its worst, and paradoxically at its most interesting, when it argues for Israeli military reforms, and is otherwise a workman-like account of a war that had barely faded from the headlines.

The strategic situation heading into 1973 was one of instability. The Arab powers, particularly Egypt and Syria, were itching for a chance to reverse their catastrophic defeat in 1967. Israel knew that a second war was coming, but conventional wisdom was that it would be in 1975, when Egypt had rebuilt its medium bomber fleet. Israeli defense policy was based around taking the initial attack with outposts and what little strategic depth was available, and then counter-attacking with an armored force composed from reserves, which required between 46 and 72 hours to be organized. And this time, diplomatic realities preventing the kind of brilliant preemptive strike which began the Six Day War. The Arabs would launch the first strike.

The long War of Attrition in the lead-up to October 1973 served Egypt and Syria better than Israel. Israeli defenses were small and undermanned, its command structure weakened by rotation of senior officer, and its defense plans ambiguous. Meanwhile, Egypt and Syria trained for years on the initial attacks, every part of the plan rehearsed, while concentrating artillery and new anti-air missiles. While Israeli military intelligence did get wind of the attack with perhaps a days notice, they specified H-hour as 6:00 PM local time, 4 hours later than the actual H-hour of 2:00 PM. The initial Arab attacks met with great success, but Israeli defenders managed to inflict outsized losses in the fine defensive terrain of the Golan heights, and desperately mobilized forces finally turned back the Syrians. Meanwhile, in the south, Egypt crossed that Suez canal across its entire 110 mile length, but failed to move deeper into Sinai. A daring counter-crossing by the Israeli military drove deep into Egyptian territory, severing the Egyptian supply lines.

This book was published before the Camp David accords were finalized, so the diplomatic resolution is out of scope of the book. And while Israeli won, its military resolve was shaken. Herzog goes after Moshe Dayan for irresponsibility as defense minister in the lead up to the war, and defeatism in command during the war. Ariel Sharon is criticized for being unable to work as part of a unified command team, a charismatic asshole after glory. And the Israeli military as a whole assumed the ongoing supremacy of its armor and airpower, neglecting its infantry and artillery and the counters of new Soviet guided missiles in Arab hands, which caused excessive causalities.

Eichmann in Jerusalem is famous for giving us the phrase "the banality of evil". 50+ years on, in the face of a worldwide refugee crisis and official policies of exclusion, denial of services, and child separation that have not yet risen to extermination, this examination of the complicity of one man, a Nazi expert in "Jewish resettlement", remains an important and challenging book.

From the start, Arendt has little sympathy for the juridical theater of David Ben Gurion's statemaking exercise of a trial for Adolf Eichmann. As a refugee herself, a former Zionist, still Jewish, always a philosopher, she sees through the contradictions in the trial. Israel kidnapped Eichmann from Argentina and is trying him retroactively for the crime of genocide, rather than any individual murder. The purpose of the trial is not to decide if Eichmann is guilty, it never would have been held if he were not undoubtedly guilty, but to demonstrate Eichmann's guilt to the world, and Israel's new power to advocate for the Jews by proclaiming it. The more important question, for Arendt and for us, is what precisely is Eichmann guilty of?

This book is at it's best when Arendt confronts Eichmann, and tries to probe his essence. He is a small man, unremarkable, totally normal except for the bulletproof glass cage around him. His testimony, thousands of pages of conversation with an Israeli interrogator, reveal a mind incapable of thought, of seeing the world from any viewpoint other than his own. Eichmann misappropriates a German idiom 'winged words' literally meaning 'quotations from the classics' to mean any cliche, and when he utters a sentence in his own words, he repeats it until it is a cliche. A repeated failure in business, Eichmann joined the SS in the early 1930s, where he rose to a middle-rank equivalent to Lt. Colonel. His job was quite literally making sure that the trains ran on time, that the transit between the ghettos and death camps was efficient and organized. He was quite good at it, and his main complaint was that he was never promoted to general.

But Eichmann is only a small part of this book, because he was only a bystander at his own trial. For much of this book is a recapitulation of the epoch-defining crime of the Shoah. Jewish communities across Europe were transported and exterminated, but there were key differences in every province of the Reich in how Jews were rendered stateless and then lifeless, with varying degrees of assistance from local anti-Semites and Jewish leaders. Arendt relies heavily on some contemporary accounts of the Holocaust here. The machinery of death is hard to grasp, both because it is horrific, and because contrary to the common conception of totalitarian as efficient, it was a mess of at least a dozen different agencies working at cross-purposes on their own version of the Holocaust.

Arednt closes the book by gesturing at 'acts of state' as transcending common morality, the Shoah as a crime against the order of nations rather than Jews in particularly, and the vagaries of responsibility in Europeans who have to live with the fact that almost all of them knew at some point, and did all too little to help. But these points are buried under the six million dead.

Evil has no depth. Evil is banal. Evil is mediocre little men who can't think in straight lines. But evil can still kill you dead.

Gordis explores the relationship between American and Israeli Jews through the metaphor of a marriage on the brink of divorce, arguing that both sides need each other. The evidence is primarily historical, based on a reading of pro and anti-Zionist statements from the 1880s through the 1930s.

Some parts of the thesis are fairly incontrovertible. Zionism was a major and fraught question in the Jewish community before the foundation of Israel in 1948. And while American Jews have chosen to primarily assimilate, with the notable exception of Haredi communities, Israel is a proudly, even defiantly Jewish ethnostate, where Hebrew is spoken and Jewish supremacy is enshrined in special law.

I believe the origins of the divide, and I don't expect any one person to have the answer to ending it in a short book. Israel may be a vibrant Jewish community, but unless I learn Hebrew it's a foreign land and a foreign people. Israelis may be thoroughly sick of being hectored by American Jews, but the refusal of the Chief Rabbinate of Israel to treat Conservative and Reform Judaism as worthwhile contributions to the faith rankles. The ongoing war crimes and genocide of the Palestinian occupation rankles, and the idea that because I am Jewish I am supposed to stay silent in defense of Israeli security is deeply personally offensive.

Where it is reasonable to expect a short book to have insight is on some more recent events. Gordis talks a lot about long-dead pre-independence Zionists and the triumph of the Six Day War, but he has almost nothing to say about the politics of the Israeli War for Independence, and the choices in state-building made thereafter. Events since 1982 and the occupation of Lebanon seem to have passed in a gray blur, for all that the book mentions them. Americans are unwilling to live with their own counter-insurgencies. Is it any surprise that we decline to live another country's?

Gordis' criticism that contemporary American Judaism is practically moribund is spot on, at least in my personal assessment of too many years of Hebrew school leading to a Bar Mitzvah. And while Israel may be more vigorously alive, it is increasingly isolated diplomatically. Both sides can point to history for examples of disaster. The First and Second Temple were sacked and destroyed. The European country with the most assimilated Jews lead their mass murder.

This book is interesting as a history, offer true, if trite insights into contemporary politics, and has no solutions. The marriage metaphor is often invoked, but it's also wrong on a basic level, because a marriage is a choice of consenting adults. A better metaphor is one of brothers. American and Israeli Jews, as a group, are descendants of a European Jewish tradition which was destroyed in the Holocaust. Orphaned, the two brothers grew up, and they grew in different directions. So what binds them, except for blood?

Kalpa Imperial is an imaginative work of fantasy from an Argentinian writer, translated into English by the Queen Herself, Ursula K. Le Guin. The stories are a multifaceted journey through the Eternal Imperium, a vast polity centered around a Golden Throne, and the succession of good and bad rulers. Each tale is told by a nameless storyteller, a popular historian.

The heart of the book is the chapter "Portrait of the Empress", which reveals how a girl who came from nothing claimed the imperial throne by truly thinking, seeing the world as it is, and not just gluing bits of others men thoughts together to make a world as we wish it to be, as most people live. That chapter is a shining gem, and many others have gorgeous dream like quality.

But the individual pieces don't quite cohere to the level of mythos, getting lost in a forest of symbols and signifiers. Maybe there's a thesis about history, power, domination, and the lure of the center in this book and I'm too inert to pick it up, or maybe it's just a metatextual game. Either way, this is very good and worth expanding my horizons for, but didn't quite hit home.

Of Boys and Men is a meticulously sourced and argued case that the guys are not alright, and that there are clear social, legal, political, and moral grounds for doing something about it. This book is truly centrist, in that it has something to annoy everybody, while also making a case for a series of eminently reasonable policy experiments to improve matters.


The Offspring - The Kids Aren't Alright

I knew, in a vague way from Liz Plank's For the Love of Men and Seligo's Who Gets in and Why, that my fellow men were having trouble, but I didn't know how bad it was. Men are overwhelmingly more likely to drop out of school, to suffer in economic transformations, be victims and perpetrators of violent crime, or to die deaths of despair or stupidity. The extensively footnoted sources hit like hammer blows. Black men in particular are doing extremely poorly, suffering from systematic racism and police brutality. They've seen almost no rise in income since 1970. Worse, every typical policy intervention: education, training, scholarships, basic income stipends and so on, benefit women but have no effect on men.

Reeves makes three major points in the introduction. The first is that policy and social science has become systematically biased towards women. While there are active efforts to track where women are falling short and various governmental panels and non-profits to remediate those gaps, there's no similar effort for men. Even the existence of poorer outcomes for men has to be reconstructed from various social science studies, because gender is frequently not a tracked variable. As an aside, Reeves is careful to note that he does not intend an attack on women or feminism, and that motherhood still places an exceptional burden on women which is not shared with men. He just wants more symmetry in gender-based policy. Second, while there are not explicit barriers to male success, in outcomes the situation for men is about as bad as it was for women in the 1960s, before the legal triumphs of second wave feminism. And finally, if men could be removed from the statistics, America might well be an actual utopia, along the lines of Herland or Whileaway from Russ's The Female Man.

As Reeves discusses, both progressives and conservatives have failed men, under the broad rubric that progressives think boys should be more like their sisters, and that conservatives think that boys should be more like their fathers. In a departure from typical searching for systematic causes, progressives tend to see male failures through the lens of individual weakness and toxic masculinity. Without harming women, progressives should use their traditional techniques to understand uniquely male challenges. Conservatives have been more attuned to male anxieties, but have abandoned any move towards better conditions in a cynical pursuit of grievance politics. The manosphere, from Donald Trump on down to Jordan Peterson and Andrew Tate, suggests an every escalating attitude of anger and social disconnection which just leads men to ever darker placers, finishing in an incel mass shooting.

What is most valuable about this book is that Reeves offers what seem to me eminently sensible policy prescriptions. The first one is focusing on education, since failures in education seem to lead into a lot of later problems. Reeves argues that biologically and neurologically, boys develop slower than girls, and the simplest policy prescription is to redshirt boys, delaying their entry into school by one year by having them do an additional year of pre-K. Redshirting is most common among upper middle class white boys who need the least assistance, and making this policy universal, along with more support for early childcare. Reeves is careful to note that biological differences between genders conceal a much greater overlap, but given how much of your life can be defined by the worst day, climbing a water tower, getting in a fist fight, being arrested for drugs, being attentive to the lowest extremes in behavior is important. This matches my own experiences. As an August birth, my parents had the option of having me be the youngest kid in the class or the oldest, and being the oldest definitely benefitted me. There was also that very weird couple of years around 6th grade where the girls had gone through puberty and were distinctly young women and the boys were mostly still little kids. And across the board, young women are more emotionally mature, more attentive, and more motivated to succeed. A second change in education is better vocational training in secondary schools and more opportunities to 'think with your hands'.

A second policy thrust is a focused policy effort to get more men into HEAL careers (Health, Education, Administration, and Literacy), similar to successful efforts to get more women into STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math) in recent decades. HEAL careers are both some of the fastest growing and most stable sectors of the economy, and there are vanishingly few men in entire fields like nursing and early childhood education for reasons which are entirely based on false cultural stereotypes. In particular, Black boys appear to benefit greatly from English classrooms with Black male teachers, and there are almost none. There should be focused efforts to recruit, train, hire, and retain men in HEAL jobs similar to how there are focused efforts for women in STEM.

And the third area is rethinking fatherhood. Both parents should get a full six months of paid parental leave. While mothers will perforce have more to with babies (I did none of the gestation or breastfeeding of my own son), fathers can take more of the lead with older children and may have an important role in teaching healthy approaches to new experiences, risk, and boundaries. Finally, while family courts have made massive strides in recognizing the rights of divorced fathers in the past few decades, unmarried fathers are still in a 1950s legal limbo of many obligations and few rights. Black men get one of their few accolades in this book, as Reeves notes that unmarried Black fathers are notably more involved than their n0n-Black unmarried counterparts.

I added this book to my list thanks to a provocative article in The Atlantic. Having read the full book, I am strongly persuaded by Reeves' arguments and evidence. Even if you disagree with his conclusions, the clear need for a better, evidence-driven discussion on masculinity and its discontents is a urgent scholarly, social and political issue.

Catherine Li is a UN Operative with a capital O, doing whatever wetwork is required out on the interplanetary frontier to keep humanity safe. And there's a lot of work that needs doing. While people back home in the metropole enjoy arts, culture, and fine food, the survival of baselines humans rests on a narrow beam above the tumultuous posthuman clades of artificial intelligences and genetic syndicates composed of indoctrinated clones bred to endure the rigors of space. UN superiority is maintained by their control of the FTL communication and transport grid, which requires precious Bose-Einstein condensate crystals from Compton's World, mined from coal veins with backbreaking labor.

After a mission goes wrong, Li is given a chance to redeem herself by carrying out an investigation/coverup on Compton's World. The UN's greatest physicist, Hannah Sharrif, and the local UN security chief, died along with hundreds of miners in a subterranean fire that seems linked, in some way, to Sharrif's experiments to find a synthetic replacement for Bose-Einstein condensate crystals. The job is a viper's pit of intrigue, and one that has brought Li back to a planet that she has tried very hard to forget.

Because Sharrif and Li are genetically identical, both from the same clone line, separated by 20 years. But while Sharrif has risen as a scientist against human racism, Li has a fabricated past that says she is only a quarter genetic construct, enough to pass the blood purity laws and work as a spy and soldier. Her augmented genetics have been boosted by specialist cybernetic hardware, making her a posthuman weapon, one who has been aimed by hidden hands, but may take control of her own path.

This book fires on all cylinders: Technothriller infiltration sequences shine, and don't outstay their welcome. Compton's World is a vivid Dickensian nightmare of coal dust and child labor, with a few thousand impoverished and exploited workers propping up prosperity for billions. By far my favorite parts of the book involved Cohen, a centuries old AI who sometimes works with Li on UN projects, but always on his own agenda. Cohen is a sybaritic humanophile, who's elegance and love of the finer things in life conceals an entirely alien intelligence. This is not a story about science and war and politics, though there is plenty of that. This is a love story, to it's quantum entangled core.

The hard scifi is full of provocative ideas, the characters are great, the world-building and plot well-trodden but executed with verve. 20 years on is a great time to read this book, and I'm excited for the rest of the series.

The thing about being the parent of a toddler is that there's clearly a lot going on in there, but also that so much of what's happening in your little guy is inaccessible. Big feelings, but not a lot of ways to deal with it. There is nothing more upset than a thwarted toddler, and they get thwarted so much.


My child is crying because I told her she couldn't go inside the dishwasher. From Bored Panda

Lieberman's model is a pretty traditional psychodynamic model*, where toddlers are torn between attachment to their parent as a secure base, and a new-found sense of independence in their growing physical abilities to walk, reach, push, and talk. But those abilities are also still profoundly limited by their dexterity, strength, and endurance.

It's hard for me to say what specifically I took out of this book, aside from a more generous way to see the world from knee height, and to give my little guy the space and support he needs to grow up.